“Music to my Ear” by Keira Zhang, 11 (Los Altos, CA) Published in Stone Soup January 2021 Illustrating “The Director” by Anya Geist, 13 (Worcester, MA) A note from William Waitlist for the Saturday Writing Workshop: The writing workshop begins next Saturday, Jan. 23. It is going to be a fun class. We are working with creativity and chance. Yes, we will be rolling dice! Enrollment was opened to existing class members last week, and 38 students have signed up. As I don’t want the class to get too big, we have closed off registration. If you want to take the class, then please register as soon as possible. You will be added to a waitlist. We will give priority to students who were in the class but haven’t yet registered. If you are in that situation, in addition to registering at EventBrite, please also write to Sarah at sarah@stonesoup.com. We will allow a few more students in, but only a literal few. If a student drops, we will fill that spot from the waitlist, so you do need to get on it to be considered for a spot in the future. Apologies! But we have to give priority to students who area already enrolled. Art: Firstly, Keira Zhang’s charcoal drawing, Music to my Ears, is just simply gorgeous. Look at it, letting your eye take it in. The drawing is also a technical tour de force. Such a beautiful, warm, and yet odd drawing! That ear! We love this drawing. Which is why it is the cover image for one of our sketchbooks. What else to say? This work is in a very old Western art tradition—the still life used as a learning tool. Studies of this kind used to be standard practice for people learning to draw. The style is now very rare. In fact, it is vanishingly rare to see such a young artist working in this traditional style. Large forms—including basic forms, like in this case a ball—illuminated with a strong light coming from a clear direction so that it casts sharp shadows. What is great about the still life for drawing students is that nothing moves! You set up your object, set the light so it shines on it to cast clear shadows, and then you start drawing: Eye. Hand. The strong light, which you see in this drawing, helps emphasize light and dark, which is what Keira was working with to create the illusion of dimensionality in her drawing. By working with I mean focusing on the light and dark and the tonalities in between to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. The still life is the ultimate training in eye-hand coordination. Keira worked in charcoal. This offered her a medium that produces a rich, warm drawing while also being at least a little flexible. With charcoal, one can lighten patches that turned out too dark and darken patches that are too light. If you choose to use charcoal, you might consider looking at YouTube videos for some pointers on making a still life with charcoal. Weekend art project: A still life is the art project for the weekend. Yes, you can do this as a photograph if you wish. You can choose normal household objects or make something that is a bit odd, like Keira’s combination of a huge plaster ear, a ball, and a violin. Balls, triangles, and cubes are very common in this style of still life. For cubes, think of toy blocks or a piece of two-by-four. Whether you are using a camera or drawing, the lighting is the key. Strong lighting emphasizes volume. Strong lighting helps you, as the artist, to focus on light and dark as the way to render volume. The ball in Keira’s drawing looks round because of the very bright part of the ball in the center in contrast to the darker edges. Starting out just drawing a well-illuminated ball could be a good approach. Pay attention in Keira’s work to the contrast between the deep black and lighter portions of her drawing. There is no way you will achieve a finished charcoal drawing at this level on your first try, so my advice for this weekend it is to keep it simple: set up your scene with a clear, strong light source. More general advice: Stay relaxed! Don’t be overly critical! If you have never ever done this before, then consider seeking advice form YouTube. One suggestion I am sure you will encounter on YouTube is that you block out images with fuzzy lines—not crisp lines like in a coloring book but thicker, more forgiving approximate outlines. This will enable you to evolve the edges by letting you both add shading and pull shading away as your feel your way to the realistic outline. Courage! If you find yourself getting discouraged, then please stop and come back to the drawing later. Writing. “The Director,” the story below, is written by Anya Geist. Anya has been writing for Stone Soup for years and is now a Stone Soup intern. She also won the Editor’s Choice in the 2020 Stone Soup Long Form Book Contest. Anya helps post to the website, develop writing prompts, and is helping develop our forthcoming podcasts. Fortunately for Anya, but sadly for us, Anya is now in high school! I haven’t yet checked with Emma or with Anya, but my guess is that this is one of the last, if not the last piece that Anya will have published in Stone Soup. So, I would like to thank Anya for her fabulous writing and photography. Her contributions to Stone Soup will be long remembered—and will be read for years to come. Thank you! The story you find below, “The Director,” is, also a tour de force, like Keira’s drawing with which it is paired. There is just so much in this story to talk about—and so little space! What I am asking you all to do today is to click on the link
Archives for January 16, 2021
Flash Contest #27, January 2021: Write a science fiction story about a character who lives one hundred years in the future–our winners and their work
Our January Flash Contest was based on our weekly creativity prompt #134, challenging writers to project themselves 100 years into the future. Entrants took us on journeys to other planets, introduced us to amazing futuristic inventions, launched spaceships and created inventive architecture. Like a lot of the best science fiction, our writers used elements of the present to project us into a possible future. We met realistic characters encountering real problems (such as the longer term effects of climate change), as well as alien creatures and sentient robots. Well done to everyone who worked so hard on their stories, we really appreciated the quality of all the entries this month. In addition to our usual 5 winners and 5 honorable mentions, we selected one entry for publication on the Stone Soup Blog in the coming weeks. Thank you for sharing your creative visions of the future world with us! In particular, we congratulate our Honorable Mentions and our Winners, whose work you can appreciate below. Winners “Stranded” by Rex Huang, 11, Lake Oswego, OR “The Turning Point” by Kaidyn Robertson, 11, Sooke, BC, Canada “A Knock on the President’s Door” by Ava Shorten, 11, Mallow, Cork, Ireland “The Meteorite” by Julia Wang, 12, Wynnewood, PA “True Self” by Yasmine Weinberger, 11, Washington, DC Honorable Mentions “Lunar Scavenger Hunt” by Riya Agarwal, 10, Portland, OR “Zen the Space Robot” by Ender Ippolito, 9, Portland, OR “Bobbo” by Cathy Jiang, 11, Portland, OR “Under the Sea” by Grace Mancini, 12, Glenside, PA “A 100 years by Anaiya Nasir”, 12, Bellaire TX Chosen for the Stone Soup Covid-19 Blog “2020” by Eden George, 10, Brooklyn, NY Rex Huang, 11Lake Oswego, OR Stranded Rex Huang, 11 The cool breeze whistled Anya to sleep as it always had. There were so few comforting things here, she had to talk to the rocks to keep her sanity! The world has long lost their charm of the bright holo screens or the rainbow colored outerwear. No, all that has sunken beneath the waves, across the miles and miles of vast empty sea that was once known as earth. Thankfully, Anya had found a patch of ground not yet swallowed by the ocean’s expanding belly. She still shivers at the thought of her little sister screaming at the top of her lungs “Help me Anya, help me! Help me!” but both of them knew it was hopeless. The ladders, destroyed. Fire escape, long gone for luxury reasons. And the hoverdrones? This makes her shake her head in disappointment. The people were drowning and the wealthy wanted to watch them die? She screamed and screeched at the flying tortoises but to no avail. She could even hear the faintest bit of laughter. But that doesn’t matter. Any day, the water will swallow this tiny patch of land that she has called home for nearly a year. She had been living, surviving each day by drinking the rain water she collected in a bottle that washed ashore, and was eating the tough coconuts from the tree next to her. She guessed they were not ripe, as she had eaten some before and they were much more soft. She had always hoped for the government to make an effort to drain the water, so that she could at least return home albeit without her family. And yet, she knew in her heart that her death by the sea, which agonizingly only came up an inch each day, was inevitable. She stomps the ground in frustration, remembering this, but when she lifted her foot, she found a piece of paper. The paper was really only the second she had seen, besides the sheet from the museum labeled “Ancient Civilization”. She picked up the paper, ever so gently. It shows a drawing of an island similar to hers. It illustrates an island having the crescent shape of a banana with a pin straight at the top. Could it be? She had always thought of her island more like the funky flower pots at home, but she started to visualize the possibility of the bottom of the banana being flooded, she realized this map was about her island! She was excited to the bone, and kept examining what the paper had to show. There was a dot trail from the rose bush she had stumbled upon when first reaching the island leading up the very palm tree beside her feet. This was it! She had heard stories of the olden day’s pirates finding treasures as many times as she had laid in her bed! But there was no big fat X as the old stories had said. So, she flipped the paper, and on that sign there was a mutated grasshopper face. She knew what that meant. It was the new world’s sign of labor and duty. Which meant she had to dig up every place on the island. She quickly assessed the size of the island, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was at least as large as 9 parking lots. No chance. She frantically scanned the paper for any extra clues. And after a couple minutes, she found something. There were trees drawn where the actual trees on the island weren’t. Wondering what this meant, she walked up to a tree and realized what type of tree it was. It was a Corrion tree. Then it struck her: Corrion leaves were notorious for being more moist when being close to metals! She frantically felt the leaves, knowing she had little time to find whatever was buried deep beneath. She eventually found out that it was facing to the very center of the line, and began digging as fast as a dog who knows there’s a bone, knowing that treasure awaits her. She soon found a large metal cone striking out of the ground. This is it, she thought. There has to be some absurd piece of technology hidden beneath, hopefully one that could get her off of the wretched island that was bound to sink as low as all that sunk before. Digging some more, she found. . . another piece of paper. She bellowed in frustration so hard that she made a seagull that was on a nearby Corrion tree squall and fly away. After overcoming this frustrating moment, she had the
